Most stores track daily revenue and stop there. It's a thermometer: it tells you there's a fever, never where it comes from. Four numbers, read together, let you make actual decisions.

1: Conversion rate, by device

The overall rate is an average that hides everything. Split between mobile and desktop, it becomes a diagnosis: a large gap points to a faulty mobile experience, which is now the most common and the most costly problem.

2: Average order value

It tells you whether your work should focus on acquisition or on your offer. A low average order value with a good conversion rate calls for cross-selling or a review of your range, not more traffic.

Revenue rises for two opposite reasons. Without the average order value, you can't tell which one.

3: Customer acquisition cost

All ad spend combined, divided by the number of new customers. Compared with your margin, this is the number that tells you whether your growth is profitable or whether you're buying revenue at a loss.

4: Share of returning customers

The most neglected indicator and the most structural one. A store that only gets first orders has to keep buying traffic. A store where a third of orders come from existing customers has a model that lasts.

  • A low repeat purchase rate with a good product points to a weak after-sales relationship, not a quality problem.
  • It is almost always cheaper to bring a customer back than to win a new one, and yet that's where most stores invest the least.

What to stop checking every day

Raw visitor counts, keyword rankings, social media stats, and yesterday's revenue. These figures fluctuate too much to mean anything over a single day, and they take up the attention you should give to the other four.

Four numbers on a single page

Put these four numbers on a single page, compared with the previous week, and look at them once a week at a fixed time. A fifteen-minute meeting is worth more than a dashboard opened ten times a day with no decision at the end.

A metric you look at without ever acting on it isn't steering. It's organized worry.